


The No Sleep Club

by hylian_reptile



Series: RvB Fluff Week [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-26
Packaged: 2019-04-08 16:52:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14109810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hylian_reptile/pseuds/hylian_reptile
Summary: She’d just had a bad dream, like a fucking child.





	The No Sleep Club

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hinn_Raven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinn_Raven/gifts).



Carolina never told anyone what happened during the alien trial on Chorus—except Epsilon, of course. But her one secret-keeper is gone like smoke; so when she dreams of watching her Freelancer team dying, one by one, and then watching the Reds and Blues dying in their stead, one by one, there’s nobody in her head to reorient her to reality. _The Director is gone. Texas is gone. York is gone. Wash is still here._

 

She’s not a _toddler_ who sneaks into her parents’ bedroom at night after a bad dream. On most nights, she heads outside to check the security system, the orbital alarm system, all the nooks and crannies that hidden assailants might be hiding on their moon. After all, you know what they say: If you want to keep a pack of twenty-something-year-old children alive, you have to do it yourself.

 

On some rare nights, she wanders into the kitchen and looks for signs of life, reassuring herself that everyone is here, everyone is accounted for, she didn’t imagine the last three years and Freelancer really is gone, and then she hooks up the electric kettle and makes a cup of tea. Not really because she likes tea, but because it reminds her of the Reds and Blues who do—Sarge, Donut, Wash, and even Tucker and Caboose if it’s iced and sugary.

 

Tonight, she walks into the kitchen at two in the morning, rattled like she’s run a marathon, and the kettle is already hot. Freshly boiled, in fact. It must have auto-shut off just a minute ago. When she peers out into the common room, there’s nobody there.

 

She forces herself to breathe slow. There was no fight. She wasn’t in a fight. She’d just had a bad dream, like a fucking _child_.

 

She pours water in her mug anyway, and she’s just ripped open the teabag when Locus, wearing what he thinks are civvies, drifts in through the base door, without so much as a sound from either door hinge or himself, and nearly scares her half to death.

 

“Christ, Locus,” she says, a little harsher than she meant, because she’s got all that extra adrenaline running through her system. He looks just as startled as she does.

 

“Agent… Carolina,” he says, like they’re meeting for the first time. Which they are, technically, under the awkward situation of both knowing the other is up at an ungodly hour because something came for them in the night, and Locus having just nearly startled a roundhouse kick out of her.

 

Locus does that—going through rooms without being noticed, skimming by walls, sitting in the corner of a conversation for half of it before they realize he’s there. It drives Carolina nuts, even though she’d _sworn_ that she’d lay off him, she had no business telling him that he wasn’t allowed to put his skills to better use out of sheer spite, she _knew_ that. It wasn’t economical, in the large karmic scheme of things, to tell someone who was so able and willing to add to the good deeds in the universe that they weren’t allowed to. It’d also be throwing stones in glass houses. She's trying to be nice to him, most of the time.

 

“Yeah, that’s me. Good morning,” Carolina says, knowing full well that it’s 2:14 AM. “Welcome to the No-Sleep Club. I borrowed your water. There’s more than enough left for you, though,” she adds, and takes down a second mug and rips open a new tea package for him. Her fingers won't stop feeling like they're vibrating at the speed of a tuning fork.

 

He seems to hesitate on the edge of something. Whatever it is he decides, he stays in the kitchen, probably because she's already in the middle of steeping his camomile. “Unusual club,” he says, like he still hasn’t gotten the hang of asking questions.

 

“Not as unusual as you’d think. If there’s more than one of us hanging out without being able to sleep, we make it a party. It's wild when Tucker's around.”

 

He gives her a doubtful look, which equates to his eyebrows moving a fraction of an inch.

 

"I'm much more low-key," Carolina says. "You're only obligated to braid my hair and let me paint your fingernails, now."

 

The moment in which Locus actually believes her and then realizes she’s pulling his leg is so worth it.

 

Her lungs still won't settle, but it does make her smirk, and it probably says something that the smirk is what makes him follow her to the couch, two mugs of tea in her hand, to sit gingerly on the farthest end of the couch. She passes him the mug. Grips her own in an iron lock. Tries to breathe out, but it comes out as a tired huff.

 

If Carolina thought the tea would help, she was wrong. It makes everything worse, and _Locus_ makes it worse, because the man just watches his tea with a meditative silence that makes her think he’s counting the seconds until the perfect moment to stop steeping the tea. Wherever his head is, she doesn’t think it’s here, and neither is hers. Her leg keeps bouncing up and down. She should have gone for a run. She should have went to check on the security system.

 

She’s too tired for this shit, and she _knows_ there’s nothing new that she’ll find on her millionth check of every alarm and tripwire. She _knows_. She just wants to sit down and go to sleep. She’s exhausted and she’s feeling it. The buzz in her head, the space where Epsilon used to be, won’t stop vibrating.

 

“I’m going out. I’ll be back,” she says, suddenly.

 

“Where?” Locus asks, in his flat way of his.

 

“Check the alarms. Do a perimeter check. Scope out the weird hiding places where there might be poachers and thieves who want to see if the legends about the Reds and Blues are true. That sort of thing.”

 

“Not necessary,” Locus says.

 

Oh, she knows that; she and Wash check the thing and its million back-up generators an ungodly number of times a day. “It’s fine. Really fast. I’ll be back,” she says, putting her tea mug down.

 

“It’s already been checked,” Locus says quickly.

 

She looks at him. “When? How? By—”

 

—and just as she says that, of course, it hits her where _Locus_ just came back from in the middle of the night: he, too, for whatever reason, had gotten up in the middle of the night and the first thing he had to do was set up a kettle of water, and then while waiting for it to boil, go check that this tiny patch of universe that belonged to the Reds and Blues was absolutely, entirely safe. Locus, who Wash had confessed to seeing in his own nightmares, although he wouldn’t specify how or where or why; Locus, who had specialized in slipping through battlefields unseen, sometimes with such skill that Epsilon could lose track of him without attention; Locus, who had fixed the oven after Sarge blew it up, never said a sharp word to Caboose, let Grif tug on his arm all day like a hyperactive beach ball.

 

She gives him a meaningful look. “Checked by who?”

 

Locus does a remarkable impression of squirming, considering that he doesn’t move an inch. “It’s been checked,” he says again.

 

“By you?” she says, with the beginning of a knowing grin.

 

“It’s been checked,” he says, in a voice that borders on grumpy.

 

Her stomach still can’t quite settle. She hesitates. “What were the read-outs?”

 

“Normal,” he replies. “Everything is fine.”

 

She hesitates again. “Just normal?”

 

“Atmosphere pressure retaining at 4% heavier than Earth’s,” he says. “CO2 levels dropped again by 0.3%, although not yet near at habitable levels of oxygen. Moon orbit retains course of expected collapse into its planet in the next nine million years.”

 

She knew that. But it's reassuring to hear it again. “It’s a good moon,” she concedes, and sits down. The tea is warn in her hands. “Defenses?”

 

“Stocked with a full casing of ammo. Laser calibration set to reaction time of less than 0.00002 seconds.”

 

It’s probably the most words she’s ever heard him say in a row, and of course it comes out like a debriefing. It’s bizarre, how familiar her former enemy’s voice sounds in the steady rhythm of mission logs.

 

“Back-up generators?” Carolina asks. When he tells her, she leans her head on the back of the couch and tucks one knee up to her chest and asks about the orbital tripwires.

 

And the second set of security controls hidden around the back of the mountain.

 

And the catch-release mechanism on the turrets.

 

And the ugly sentry-Warthog Sarge had installed at the bottom of the lake.

 

And the PA system for the alarm blare.

 

And the radio signals that connected to their helmets.

 

He's checked it all. He can detail everything about it, as if she was there and had done it herself.

 

Slowly, the knot in her stomach eases. She’s exhausted, and she’s feeling it. Locus can answer her every question without hesitation, at a soldier’s sedate but ceaseless pace, with a relentless eye for detail that she knows must have made him a rising star in the army, once.

 

Carolina yawns at some point, and he stops. "It's getting late," he says, in his roundabout way of hinting at going back to sleep.

 

“I’m still listening,” she says, and puts down her tea mug and yawns again. “Transmission?”

 

Locus doesn’t even nod. “Transmission towers to Chorus checked and functional with a successful transmission as of 0130,” he says.

 

“Good,” she says. “I’m listening,” she says, but forgets to say what to.

 

Eventually, Locus’s voice goes on, the one time he’s spoken without prompting, and she’s barely awake to hear it.

 

She falls asleep listening to gentle military reports, the slowest, steadiest song of her family’s safety.

 

* * *

 

 

Carolina wakes up with a crick in her neck, a stiff back, her tea mug washed and dried by the sink, and a blanket across her.

 

Really awful, how Locus does that—walking around without making a sound, sneaking up on people in the night, slipping through defenses as easily as if he were invisible. Nobody should be able to sneak up on her, even when she’s asleep. A trained sniper is, theoretically, the worst kind of enemy to have inside a base.

 

But the blanket is very warm. And for all her body’s complaints, she doesn’t feel quite so tired, anymore.


End file.
